feet pounding in the mud as he raced, unknowingly, toward the edge of the towering cliffs.
Kealey emerged from the back of the house at a dead sprint with Vanderveen’s gun in his hand, moving fast toward the water. He was numbed by what had just happened. It couldn’t last, though, and cutting through the emptiness was the inescapable truth: that he was responsible for all of it. By putting the hunt for William Vanderveen ahead of Katie, he had killed her just as surely as if he had stabbed her himself, and he couldn’t get the image out of his mind: Katie, kicking and writhing on the floor, trying to cry out through the blood that was filling her throat, the hideous gurgle that had emerged instead. God, no. No!
Vanderveen spun around when he heard what might have been, carrying high over the howling wind, a scream of agony and bottomless pain. The sound brought a smile to his face. Kealey was coming.
The path had ended in a wide clearing, several solitary fence posts standing guard on the perimeter. The mud was churning around his feet as though attempting to swallow him whole, but far more terrifying was the precipitous drop that ended the world just 10 feet in front of him. The sky above was in constant motion, twisting black clouds lit bright by sheets of lightning, the thunder pounding hard just seconds later with enough force to make the ground shake. The wind was icy cold and constant, bringing silver streaks of rain in from over the tortuous swells of the ocean.
He tried to think. Kealey had his gun, and he was without a weapon. He had to get out of the clearing immediately.
Directly behind him, where the path turned into the underbrush, Vanderveen heard the unmistakable sound of splashing feet.
Kealey turned the corner and stepped into the empty clearing. He was buffeted hard by the wind, which didn’t seem to be going in any one direction, but the USP Compact was up and steady in front of him. He had dropped the magazine on the self-loading pistol on the way out of the house to see that it contained four bullets. That meant that Vanderveen had not reloaded after his bloody escape from F Street, as only three rounds had been fired inside the house. There was one in the chamber, though, so he actually had five Federal 155 grain Hydra-Shok rounds with which to kill the man, and he planned to use every last one of them.
He wasn’t sure if that would be enough. In the recessed lighting of the kitchen, Vanderveen had seemed almost inhuman. Part of it was his appearance. It had been Ryan’s first close look at the man in almost eight years, and he clearly hadn’t lost a step in that period of time. If anything, he looked even stronger and leaner than he had during his time as one of the most capable soldiers in the U.S. Special Forces community.
More than that, though, was the fact that Vanderveen appeared to be driven by something far more powerful than his natural physical strength. It was the way his eyes burned with that strange light that others, not knowing better, might have mistaken for ambition, religious fervor, greed, or any other kind of overpowering emotion.
Kealey was under no such illusions. He knew that Will Vanderveen was driven by hate, and hate alone.
For Ryan, these were not specific thoughts, but vague considerations that drifted on the edge of his tortured mind. In the confusion of fact and fiction, however, he was able to grab hold of one thing that may or may not have helped him: When it comes to that man’s eyes, it all looks the same.
Listening to this strange epiphany in his head, everything else went quiet for a minute. The shrieking wind seemed to drop to a murmur, the storm fell blessedly silent, and he heard footsteps coming fast behind him.
He turned without looking, the gun coming up. As he fired, he felt a stinging in his face. Then he was falling, but still on solid ground. The muzzle flashes were lost in a sheet of lightning that briefly turned night into day.
Did I hit him? Ryan didn’t know, couldn’t see as he stood and wiped what might have been water out of his eyes. He hadn’t counted the number of rounds he had fired, wasn’t sure if it was two or three. He didn’t know how far he might be from the edge, and he was still trying to get his bearings when something slammed into his left side. He felt his ribs give way with a sickening crack.
The breath left his lungs in a rush as he crashed to the ground. Ryan tried to face the other man, but still couldn’t see much more than a vague outline through the blood streaming down over his forehead and into his eyes.
He became aware then that Vanderveen was towering over him, but when he blinked, the man was gone. Ryan wondered why until he realized that the gun was no longer in his hand. Staggering to his feet, his vision cleared momentarily and he saw a dark figure scrambling across the clearing, the outstretched hand reaching for an object in the mud.
Ryan took two steps forward when the pain hit him like a hammer in the side. His ankle felt like it had been crushed in a vise, but somehow he was still running as Vanderveen turned with the gun, getting off one shot before Ryan hit him low and sent him tumbling out into space.
Vanderveen reached back for the ground, shocked to find that it wasn’t there. He was caught by a sudden downdraft and carried away from the cliff wall, pelted the whole way by stinging beads of rain. Looking up, the clouds were getting very far away, and when he began to turn in midair, his eyes finally locked onto the churning waters below.
The impact came, crushing the breath out of his lungs as the ocean sucked him down. He was instantly paralyzed by the cold, but it couldn’t last; the pain followed a split second later, rippling through his body in an agonizing wave, pulling him back from the brink of conciousness. He struggled for the surface as the darkness closed in around him.
Ryan was still in the clearing, less than 2 feet from the edge. He lay motionless in the freezing mud, trying to take account of his injuries. He knew without looking that most of the ribs on his left side were broken. His ankle didn’t feel right at all; he remembered that it had almost collapsed when he tried to run on it. Gingerly, he reached up to touch the jagged cut on his forehead when he was stopped by another sudden pain.
It didn’t take long to locate the source. Vanderveen’s last round had caught him in the right side. Pulling back his jacket and lifting his shirt to expose the neat hole, he saw that it was bleeding slowly but steadily. Carefully reaching back with his right hand, he felt for, but didn’t find what would have been a much larger exit wound.
He wasn’t sure how much damage the bullet had done, and after thinking about it for a while, decided that he really didn’t care. Vanderveen was finally dead, but at what cost?
Katie.
He had been numb to this point, but the sense of loss he suddenly felt was far more painful than the injuries he had sustained.
Lying there in the damp, he idly wondered how long it would take for him to join her. His eyelids were already getting heavy, and the cold didn’t seem as pronounced as it had been a few minutes earlier. The pain wasn’t as bad either. Not nearly as bad.
His right hand moved up and away from the hole in his side, drifting over a lump in his jacket. He felt delirium coming on, so he double-checked to make sure he had not imagined it. No, there was definitely something there. He pulled it out to see: his cell phone.
Ryan put his head back in the mud and thought about it. If he called now, they might make it in time. They might not. He didn’t know.
Was it important?
Why should he care?
A few minutes later, he returned the phone to his pocket and settled back to wait.
CHAPTER 36
CAPE ELIZABETH,WASHINGTON, D.C.
Callie Palmer hunched over her steering wheel and tried to see through the rain streaking down her windshield. The storm had gotten progressively worse since her departure from Orono more than two hours earlier, but she was now down to the last few miles of the trip, much to her relief.
She was tired after a full day of classes, but she was also worried about her best friend. That was why she had decided to drive down for the weekend, bringing with her the few things that would be needed to lift Katie’s spirits: two six-packs of Rolling Rock and a few good movies on DVD.
Usually that did the trick, but Callie wasn’t so sure this time. Her closest friend was really upset over her latest spat with Ryan, and didn’t seem inclined to stop brooding about it anytime soon.
